In Plain English: Remember the Artifact Twitch Trolls? Twitch Is Suing Them

June 17th, 2019 Connor

Donde los yikes!

And some of you thought it wouldn’t get any crazier than Jagex suing anonymous cheaters. Those of you who follow internet drama very closely may recall that last month there was a bit of a controversy surrounding the Artifact category of Twitch streams. Specifically that people were using the service to stream movies and in some cases really inappropriate videos like the Christchurch shooting and hardcore pornography. Twitch acted pretty fast to ban the accounts and stop new streams from going up in the section, but the damage was pretty much done.

Fast forward a few weeks and Twitch is suing! The lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California has been officially dubbed Twitch Interactive Inc. v. John and Jane Does 1-100. The lawsuit demands a jury trial and couches its claims in federal trademark infringement, breach of contract, trespass to chattels, and fraud. As always, links to the documents have been provided via Google Drive at MMO Fallout’s expense, below this article.

Among its claims, Twitch believes that users took advantage of automated software to continue creating Twitch accounts and streaming the live massacre and copyright infringing movies, as well as using bots to artificially increase the popularity of said streams in order to make them more discoverable by actual people. The streams actually became enough of a problem that Twitch was forced to disable streaming for all new accounts before imposing two-factor authentication for certain accounts. Those responsible for streaming the illicit material then went to the lengths of using old accounts and even purchasing accounts in order to keep streaming.

For using the Glitch and Twitch marks on a website associated with the streaming raids, Twitch is asking for injunctive relief, compensatory damages, and attorneys’ fees related to trademark infringement. For breaching contract by willfully, continuously, and materially breaching the Twitch terms of service, Twitch is asking for special damages in lost profits and other reasonably foreseeable harms caused by defendant’s breach. For trespass to chattels (unlawful interference with another person’s property) by continuing to access the service after being banned, Twitch is asking for injunctive relief, compensatory damage, attorneys’ fees, and other remedies. And for committing fraud in misrepresenting and concealing their identities, Twitch is asking for all compensatory and punitive damages available.

In addition, Twitch is asking the courts to permanently enjoin defendants from using Twitch services, creating any bot that would interact with Twitch, using the Twitch trademarks, and assisting in anyone else who might do the above.